by Owen Sheers
As a consequence the modern rugby player, while physically robust, inhabits a fragile existence in which they occupy an ever-narrowing space between two uncertainties: the chance of injury and the doubt of selection. The two are interrelated, which is why many of these players never thought they would be on the bus today as it drives on towards Cardiff and a Grand Slam decider against France. For all of them each selection is not only a matter of beating the others vying for your shirt, but also of defying the physical vagaries of the game: the twist, tear, break or dislocation that sees fortunes rise and fall in the turn of a second.
This has certainly been the case for all three second rows on the bus, their heads rising higher over the seats than the other players. At the start of the campaign the towering Luke Charteris, just a few inches off seven foot, still had his wrist in a cast. Alun Wyn Jones was out with ‘turf toe’, while Ian ‘Ianto’ Evans, after three years of injuries, considered himself so far out of contention he’d planned his wedding and honeymoon to coincide with the squad’s upcoming summer tour of Australia. And yet, in illustration of how drastically a player’s week, month or year can change, by the end of today Ianto will be the only Welsh player to have played every second of every match for the whole of the Six Nations. ‘You have to play the patience game,’ Ianto says, speaking of his years of injury. ‘It’s like hitting your head against a brick wall until the crack becomes a little bigger, until eventually you can get through it and see beyond it. But mentally it’s very tough,’ he adds, nodding his head in recollection. ‘Very tough.’
*
Across the aisle from Jamie, and one of the few on the bus not listening to music, is the hooker and ex-captain of Wales, Matthew Rees, or ‘Smiler’, as he’s known to the squad. As his moniker suggests, Matthew’s natural expression falls into the suggestion of a quiet, Mona Lisa-like smile, as if he’s just remembered a joke at which you’ll only ever be able to guess. Even now, as he looks out at the cars passing the bus, tooting their horns, the fans giving thumbs up through their windows, the echo of a grin still plays at the corners of his mouth.
Today will be Matthew’s fiftieth cap. To mark the occasion he’ll lead the team out onto the field. As recently as a few weeks ago, though, Matthew thought he wouldn’t be here today. Having already missed the 2011 World Cup with a neck injury, he recovered, only to tear his calf muscle in training before the Ireland match, meaning he would miss the first three games of the tournament. ‘It was’, he says, ‘hard, very hard. The lowest point in my career.’
Matthew was part of the 2007 World Cup squad when an underprepared Wales underperformed and were knocked out by Fiji. So to go through the hardships of Poland, to feel the ‘sense of belief’ in this squad, knowing they’d trained harder than ever before, and then not to be able to join them was heartbreaking for Matthew, and even more so because he knew he’d lose the captaincy to Sam in the process. At the start of the Six Nations, after he injured his calf, it looked as if he’d have to experience the same again: to train with a squad hungry for the Grand Slam, and yet not be part of it. His only hope, as all players know, was to give his all in rehab, which he did, working all hours of the day and night with Carcass to try and win back his place in the team.
‘Rehab’ is a word often used when talking about rugby players, but one that is strangely dislocated from the reality of its meaning. Only those who have undergone the million shoulder rotations, or the all-night, two-hourly icing of a thigh, or the endless repetition of the same stretch or single exercise will know that rehab is, in many ways, a tougher ordeal than regular training. Most of it is done alone, without a team beside you. And all of it is done in hope, not certainty. At the end, even if you are successful and return to full fitness, there is no guarantee another player hasn’t already staked a claim to your shirt in your absence. But however hard it is, rehab is also a truth of the modern game, the unseen struggle every player undergoes at some point in their career. Which is why, as the Wales bus continues down the M4 towards Cardiff, along with the players inside, it also bears their thousands of hours of rehab, as much a part of this team as their years of playing and training on the pitch.
Even without injury, from the longer perspective of his childhood Matthew never imagined he’d one day be on this bus, travelling towards his fiftieth cap. Although as a child he was an avid rugby fan, rushing out to play in the street after watching Wales on TV, coming from Tonyrefail in the Rhondda Matthew didn’t think international players came from places like his valley, his home. That he began to think they might, and that he could be one of them, was down to one man: Chris Jones, the coach of Rhondda schools. It was Chris who gave the eleven-year-old Matthew a sense of belief, who opened the possibility for him that perhaps, just perhaps, if he worked hard enough, he could make that journey from playing on the streets of the Rhondda to playing on the national ground in Cardiff. Which, fifteen years later at the age of twenty-six, he did, running out at the Millennium Stadium against Australia in 2006.
Such is the brevity of a rugby generation that today’s bus is able to contain not just Matthew’s achievement but also, in Jenks sitting a few rows in front of him, the symbol of his boyhood aspiration. When Matthew went out onto those streets as a kid to chuck a ball around, he and his mates would choose which Welsh players they’d like to be. Matthew always chose to be Neil Jenkins, Wales’s outside-half points machine. Within a few years he found himself rooming with Jenks, when they both played for Pontypridd. Now, as player and coach, they are both on this bus, members of the same Wales squad. And yet to this day Matthew has never told Jenks that when as a boy he’d dreamed of playing for Wales, it was through him that he did so. Jenks who, like Chris Jones, has had a hand in developing the talents and aspirations of so many young players, Matthew Rees, even if he still doesn’t know it, being one of them.
All the players on this bus have coaches like Chris Jones in their past: the friend’s father who volunteered at their mini-rugby games, the school PE teacher, the coach of their junior, youth or local sides. The coaches who put in the hours when these men were boys, who first lit their touchpapers of hope and enthusiasm. Or it may have been someone later in their development: a regional skills or defence coach, or the head of strength and conditioning. Whoever it was, they took their game to the next level, spent time with them, passing on knowledge and advice, pushing them further and making them believe.
Whoever these men are, they too, along with the squad’s thousands of hours of training and rehab, are travelling on this bus into Cardiff today. As each player boarded at the Vale, they carried the influences of these men onto the coach with them. And they carried on, too, the memories of the hundreds of pitches and playing fields across the country on which they learnt their craft. In Risca, Bancyfelin, Abercrave, Carmarthen, Llandeilo, Rhayader, Gorseinon, Tonyrefail, Aberavon, Llangefni, St Clears. On pitches levelled out of high valleys like Aztec terraces; or on West Walian farming fields, scattered with dandelion and thick with clover; or on school pitches with turf worn away by the patterns of other sports. As the bus takes a slip road off the motorway and drops towards the capital, these fields and places of Wales, with their tir and their pridd, are also freighted on this coach; distinct yet shared echoes in each player’s past as they make their way towards today’s match and its eighty minutes of heightened present.
*
A few seats along from Matthew, Leigh, looking out at the passing buildings, is listening to a song by the Foo Fighters; then, as the bus is guided through a set of traffic lights by its escort, a dance track he’s copied from Gethin Jenkins. Jonathan Davies sits opposite him, looking out at the passing shops, parks and trees. Like Matthew he doesn’t wear headphones. He used to have a match-day playlist for this journey, but he’s stopped that now. Keeping things simple has become Jon’s mantra for a match day instead. Keeping it calm and simple.
Alun Wyn Jones is also choosing to keep it calm, listening to the languid songs of Ben Howard.
When he was younger he wanted heavy stuff – rock and dance – but with experience he’s learnt not to stoke his emotions too soon. Like the rest of the squad he’ll be spending the next two hours trying to reach the right balance between aggression and focus, between adrenalin and nerves. At the moment, as the bus moves through Cardiff, that balance is still weighted more towards nerves. But this is how he likes it at this stage in the day. If he isn’t nervous now, with the stadium just minutes away, then that’s when Alun Wyn becomes fearful, worried he’s become too complacent, too accepting. But this, the bubbling of anticipation under the skin, the blend of foreknowledge and the unknown, the gradual building of internal energy, these are the kind of nerves that work for Alun Wyn and which will, he hopes, provide the tinder to fire him when he takes to the pitch.
*
The bus drives on, the fizz and beat from leaking head-phones still the only sound. With four miles to go they are over halfway. The more experienced players have an idea of what will be waiting for them as they drive deeper into the city. For winger Alex Cuthbert, though, who played his first fifteen-a-side game just this time last year, he only has the stories of those who have already witnessed a Grand Slam with which to try and picture what is waiting for them on the streets of the capital. What he does know for certain, however, is that they are about to break the bubble of their isolation. In four miles’ time they will be delivered from their week of preparation in the Vale, from their days of focused and steady training, straight into the heat of a Welsh cauldron of expectation and hope.
For Alex, sitting as he has done for all four previous matches on the right-hand side of the bus, today is the pinnacle of a dizzying ascent to the top of international rugby. It was only four years ago that a coach at Hartbury College spotted him playing a lunchtime game of sevens with some mates. He was playing football for Gloucester City at the time, and while he’d always been into his sports, from athletics, in which he was a forty-nine-second 400m runner, to show jumping, Alex had never properly tried rugby. Within a year of that lunch-time game he was playing for Wales Sevens, and within another two he had a contract with Cardiff Blues and had been called up to the full national squad.
Although Alex is as big and fast as George on the other wing, he is also raw and still learning how to read the game. George has been playing since the age of ten. Others in the squad, such as James Hook or Mike Phillips, have been playing since the age of five. These players have rugby in their veins; the rhythms and patterns of a match are woven into their spatial awareness. Alex, in comparison, is still being shaped with every second on the pitch. What he lacks in experience, however, he more than makes up for with his energy of attack and undying, emotional enthusiasm. When the exertion of a match is starting to show in others, Alex will still be looking for the ball, eager to unleash his coiled speed upon the opposition. As Rob Howley once said of him, referring to both his horse-riding past and his strength and stamina, ‘The thing about Cuthbert is, he is the fucking horse.’
Although he may have played for more years than Alex, George, sitting a few seats away, still fizzes with equal enthusiasm, no less genuine than the day he came home from his first rugby training session and told his father, ‘It’s awesome! You can run at people, run around them, and you can tackle them!’ During the first Wales match this year, against Ireland in Dublin, George performed all three of those boyhood observations with world-class timing and focus. In the process, he provided a moment of brilliance that became emblematic of Wales’s intentions for the tournament.
It happened in the fifty-fourth minute of the game. With Wales trailing by five points George took the ball from Rhys Priestland in midfield to go outside Ireland’s D’Arcy before bulldozing the Irish centre McFadden with a massive impact. As he was tackled by another two defenders, George deftly off-loaded the ball to Jonathan Davies with a backwards ‘cat-flap’ of a pass. The sheer power of his flooring of McFadden drew a gasp from the crowd. It was immediately followed by a cheer of appreciation as he flipped the ball to Jon, who sprinted through the gap to score a vital try under the posts. In creating that gap George had not only taken out four Irish players, but had also displayed a perfect moment of ‘beauty and the beast’ rugby; an almost simultaneous show of brute strength and delicate skill that had kids across Wales copying his back-handed offload for weeks.
In the changing rooms after the match Warren acknowledged the remarkable disparity between his young winger’s age and his performance. ‘And to think you’re nineteen years old,’ he said to George in front of the whole team, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You were world-class out there today.’ George, bowing his head, smiled in response.
And yet within the hour, in suit and tie at the post-match dinner, George’s age seemed to have found him once more. As he bounded across to the bar, a Diet Coke disappearing in one huge hand, he looked, despite his height, every inch the sixth-former at a school-leavers’ disco, those massive limbs which had done such damage on the pitch imbued once more with a teenager’s energetic awkwardness. But however young he might have appeared that evening, it was the maturity and finesse of George’s play that continued to fire the celebrations. His determination, skill and strength in that single moment quickly became symbolic of Wales’s win, its resonance fuelling the Welsh fans’ drinking on the streets of Dublin and the smile of Roger Lewis as he played blues and boogie-woogie on the hotel’s piano long into the night.
George himself recognises that being thrown into top-flight rugby has accelerated his maturity. ‘It’s been an intense couple of years,’ he says. ‘Sometimes it feels as if I left home, grew up, played for Wales, straight one after the other.’ Which is, more or less, exactly what happened.
After a year of schoolboy rugby George had just one afternoon off at the end of his exams before starting preseason training with the Scarlets the next morning. Since then he hasn’t stopped through a year with the Scarlets, an autumn international series, a shoulder operation and rehab, more regional rugby and the Six Nations, the World Cup, the European Championship and now the Six Nations once again. With the end of the season and the squad’s summer tour still ahead of him, by the time George finally gets a break from rugby in July he will, like many of the players on this bus, have been on a treadmill of playing and training for almost two years.
When George does get that break he’ll use much of it to return to his home in North Wales, driving the length of the country to get back to his family on Ynys Môn. For most of the drive there’s no phone signal, so, for once, no one can get hold of him. For a few brief hours, listening to music, looking at the views, George is alone as he heads north on the A470 through the mountains of mid-Wales. With each mile he drives, George is aware of an elision occurring in his mind between the length of a rugby pitch and the length of the country, the territory of one mapping over the other. It’s an elision he thinks of consciously in his car, acknowledging to himself that each tree, village, hill he passes is another part of the country he represents when he puts on the red shirt of Wales. Today the same thought will come to him again, but more sensed than known when, amid 75,000 voices, he’ll experience that eighty-minute contraction when the length of Wales is squeezed into those hundred metres of pitch. ‘I come from a small village,’ George says. ‘But when I play for Wales, I come from a big country.’
For George that feeling is simply the best thing in the world. There is nothing like it. He gets goose pimples just talking about it. And yet exactly because it means so much to George, because representing and winning for Wales means everything to him, there are times when he has to remember it isn’t. That it is, in fact, just a game. This is something sports psychologist Andy McCann has worked on with the young winger. How to switch off away from rugby, in order to prevent, as George puts it, ‘the thing you love from killing you’. How to be prepared, but not over-prepared, to think but not over-think. How to treat a game as the most important thing in the world, yet still take the winning or th
e losing of it in your stride.
For George, most of these questions are answered with a negotiation between remembering and forgetting: forgetting the stresses and import of the game, and remembering the joy he’s always got from playing it, ever since he returned from that first training session as an excited ten-year-old. As the bus follows its escort into Cowbridge Road, this is what George reminds himself of again now. To harness the same pleasure for this match as that which he felt when throwing a ball around with his friends on the ‘cabbage patch’ beside Llangefni Thirds. Which is why, when George is sitting in his stall later, writing trigger words on his strapping, the first word he’ll spell out on the inside of his wrist will be ‘Enjoy’.
Dan Lydiate, sitting a few seats behind George, has worked with Andy on switching off away from rugby too. But along with Andy’s techniques Dan also uses his family farm in Llandrindod Wells to escape from the echo chamber of the game. Like George’s home of Ynys Môn, Llandrindod is a couple of hours north of the country’s southern corridor of top-flight competition. So as a youngster Dan, too, had to make a journey south to pursue his playing career. Unlike George, however, his was taken gradually, the names of his junior and youth clubs picking out the stepping stones of his route: Llandrindod Wells, Builth Wells, Gwernyfed, Brecon, Newport Youth, Pontypool United and finally his current region, the Gwent Dragons. If he has a Friday match, then Dan takes the opportunity to reverse that trip south and will spend the weekend back on the farm. ‘It’s where I go to switch off,’ he says, speaking as he often does through a gentle smile. ‘I’ll potter around on the quad, drive round the sheep in the fields. I come back the next week feeling that bit more refreshed.’ He often does a bit of work too, helping out his father and brothers. Although as he admits, ‘It’s only the weekend jobs, so it’s still a quiet time.’
